Digital imaging devices such as copiers, scanners and other reproduction and display devices often employ automatic segmentation techniques to identify text regions within document image data. Accurate segmentation of text regions and non-text regions is critical for a number of processing operations performed by digital imaging devices including image compression performance, optical character recognition (OCR) processing, extraction of data or information from forms, and rescreening. It is desirable that a segmentation method operate on a range of image data types including halftones and minimize introduction of image artifacts Additionally, it is desirable that an implementation of the segmentation processing should be fast enough to permit real-time processing without requiring special hardware or application specific integrated circuit or other specialized hardware.